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Human trials begin for anti-HIV drug
By Wu Chong (China Daily)
Updated: 2006-02-23 05:34
Chinese scientists have announced that a chemical compound efficacious for
treating both HIV and hepatitis B is being tested on humans.
Extracted from a Chinese herb called Inula britannic, the compound,
1,5-di-O-caffeoylquinic acid (1,5-DCQA), has proved to be able to work on HIV or
HBV (hepatitis B virus) in a way different from current medicines, Dong Junxing,
a leading scientist with the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, said on
Tuesday.
"If clinical experiments back up initial findings, the compound will be an
irreversible HIV and HBV integrase inhibitor, which provides a new alternative
for AIDS and hepatitis B treatment," said Dong.
Another discovery is that the new compound has few side effects even in large
doses. "Preliminary experiments on animals show that suspending, or stopping,
the use of the compound during treatment does not lead to deterioration of the
disease, which will be a big advance from current anti-HBV and HIV/AIDS
medicines, such as the popular cocktail therapy," the professor said.
Dong and his team started research in 1993 with filtering effective anti-HBV
constituents from more than 100 kinds of Chinese herbs. Two years later, they
began to experiment on ducks and monkeys.
Aware of the similar duplication mechanism between HIV and HBV viruses at the
beginning, Dong said he tried the chemical constituent on HIV after discovering
its successful inhibition of HBV.
In his experiment with monkeys, he stopped medication after weeks and found
that while most monkeys in the group treated by the cocktail therapy appeared to
deteriorate, the other group taking the new compound showed better results.
"Half of the monkeys were recuperating; and the other half continued in a
stable condition with our treatment," Dong said.
The research team has begun a six-month clinical research on about 200
healthy volunteers. "If it goes smoothly, a new medicine will be on the market
in two years," he said.
"We will try a combined prescription of the new drug and current medicines to
see whether it can have better efficacy."
The price of the new drug may be much lower than any other now available,
Dong said, because they can synthesize the constituent chemically instead of
extracting it from herbs.
(China Daily 02/23/2006 page2)
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